


upon the tedious shores

by Aisalynn



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, John Silver Backstory (Treasure Island), M/M, Nothing graphic and very brief, Silver is angsty and then he is sappy, pet names and endearments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-17 00:41:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28840320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aisalynn/pseuds/Aisalynn
Summary: He didn’t remember his mother. He didn’t know if she held him close to her body and rocked him in her arms, whispering his name into the top of his head. Didn’t know if she named him at all.It didn’t matter. When you live a life as unremarkable as his, no one cares what you are called.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/John Silver, Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton
Comments: 8
Kudos: 95





	upon the tedious shores

John Silver had no real name.

At least, not one he could remember.

His earliest memories involved a looming figure snarling the word _boy_ at him from the other side of the room. It must have been his father, he later supposed, though there was no affection attached to the thought. When he heard that snarl from the corner of the room he tried to hide in it always meant pain. A sharp cuff to the ear, an angry hand clenched around the back of his neck as the man cursed him, his hot, rancid breath puffing over Silver’s face.

It was almost a relief when he was thrown out onto the streets. Starvation, the cold—they were pain and terror of another kind, but somehow better than huddling in that corner, wishing with all that was in him to be unnoticed, to disappear.

He didn’t remember his mother. He didn’t know if she held him close to her body and rocked him in her arms, whispering his name into the top of his head. Didn’t know if she named him at all.

It didn’t matter. When you live a life as unremarkable as his, no one cares what you are called.

“My name is John Silver,” he told the pirate as he held his hands up in the air, and of course it wasn’t. It wasn’t even the name he’d used on that ship.

_Thief_ , Randall had muttered in that flat, vacant way he said everything, and his eyes didn't leave Silver's face.

It was true. One of the first skills Silver learned was how to steal to survive. He felt no shame in it, and believed that only people who had never been a stolen mouthful of food away from starvation would feel shame, but he hadn't been on the _Walrus_ long before he learned that the crew made a very sharp distinction between _pirate_ and _thief_.

It all seemed to be a matter of semantics to Silver, but he was nothing if not good at adapting to whatever situation he found himself in, so he took pains to hold the truth from the men who didn't already know about the page, and made sure to become indispensable to those who did.

Including the captain.

Living out on the streets in some of the worst parts of London Silver was careful to never give the same name to people. It was a trick he learned from some of the older boys he followed around at the beginning, but unlike them, he didn’t limit it to the adults who sometimes flagged them down in order send them off with a quick message down the street, or the concerned women in too fine clothes who would bend and ask him softly about his mother.

He was Peter to the kids who lingered in the alleys surrounding the daily market, running out and snatching any scraps of food or sellable goods they could get away with before scattering back into nooks and crannies pursuing adults couldn’t squeeze into. To the kids who wound their way through the crowds and lifted purses in Covent Garden he was known as Elias, and the pretty baker’s daughter who would sneak him a warm roll every now and then—darting a quick glance over shoulder to make sure her father wasn’t looking—called him Laurie.

Only Solomon, the older boy who found him shivering against the wet brick of a nameless building four nights after his father had washed his hands of him, knew the truth. He’d leaned over Silver, blocking the rain with shoulders just starting to broaden into a man’s and asked his name, realization flickering across his features when Silver just stared up at him in confusion.

Silver was no one. He was nothing. But it didn’t take him long to learn that being no one had it’s advantages.

“You _shit_ ,” Flint spat, and Silver felt the pleased smile drop from his lips.

It wasn’t the worst thing he had been called—not by far—but it was a little confusing none-the-less. He wasn’t trying to be a shit at the moment. That wasn’t the intended effect at all. He’d genuinely thought he and Flint had been on the same goddamn page for once, and a difficult, but assured escape from the entire situation was in their immediate future. As usual, Silver felt his tenuous control of the situation slip through his fingers the longer he talked to Flint, a feeling that only increased as the man stalked barefoot and wounded into the sea, fully intent on capturing a Spanish warship on his own.

Silver grit his teeth as he followed.

_Filth_ he was called, once he had grown a few feet and was no longer deemed young enough to be pitied. _Wretch_.

Gentlemen sneered at his ratty clothes and his dirty face, and no longer offered a coin in payment for a simple task or errand. Women stopped asking him where his parents were and instead turned away, dainty hands reaching up to cover their wrinkling noses.

Then there were the others. _Pretty_ they whispered as they coiled their fingers through his dirty curls. _So pretty,_ as they cupped his face, cheekbones sharp against their palms, hunger having stripped his face of its childish curve. It was a well known secret where you could find these men. Where, if you were desperate enough, you could linger in the mouth of an alley alone and vulnerable at night and they would find you, pay you.

Silver was only desperate enough a few times. The last time he left the alley, bruised and gasping, the small knife he kept hidden was bloody in his hand. They found the man with his throat slit in the back of that alley the next day, and the word slipped from everyone’s lips for several blocks: _murderer._

Silver took pains to make sure no one knew that the word should be attached to him, and he also made sure he was never that desperate again.

_Quartermaster_.

The title weighed heavy on Silver, pressing against his lungs and sinking down into his stomach, twisting there.

The word trapped him as much as it gave him a place in the world. He felt the looks the men gave him against his skin as he used the ropes to keep his balance. Admiration. Appreciation. Concern.

It was stifling, and all the concern in the world wouldn’t change the facts.

What was left of his leg cramped from having to compensate for the rolling of the ship by pressing into the base of the metal boot, and the wound, still too sore, too raw, throbbed. He clenched his jaw, held on to the ropes and didn’t wonder what the men might say in their private time.

 _Cripple_ , they might mutter sadly when he wasn’t around to here. _Invalid_.

In darker moments, when he sat in the privacy of the captain’s cabin and dipped a cloth in the extra water ration Flint allowed him so he could squeeze droplets over the red, swollen flesh his mind would supply him with harsher, crueler words.

_Useless. Worthless._

When Silver was seventeen years old he fell in love. No longer stealing on the streets to survive, he managed to talk his way into a job at the docks, unloading and loading boxes of goods and fish, piling them high in the merchant’s carts. He’d had agreements with several different merchants and captains and the money was good enough for him to rent a small room to live in. It was nothing more than a twin bed and a rickety table, and in the winter the wind slipped through the cracks where the window didn’t quite meet the walls, but it was his, and it was the only home he’d ever had.

The manual labor helped him lose the thin, sickly look of his childhood. His shoulders broadened, his arms and legs thickened, and in the summer the sun glinting off of the river tanned his skin to a dark gold. He caught the eye of one of the ship captain’s wives. She was young and bored with life with a husband always at sea, and it wasn’t long until they were back in his small room, tumbling in his thin sheets.

 _Handsome_ , she murmured as she traced the line of his jaw with her fingertips. _Strong_ , she giggled as he picked her up by her thighs and pressed her against the wall, buried his face in her sweet smelling hair.

 _Fool_ , he realized later. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the ground outside the building that housed the small room that used to be his and wiped at his mouth with a shaking hand. Two days before he had begged Bridget to leave with him, to pack her things and meet him at his place so they could leave London and its dismal streets behind.

 _William_ , she had sighed, her full mouth tipping into a frown. _I can’t. I thought you understood that._ She hadn't cried, she never looked back as she walked out the door, and two days later her husband and three members of his crew were waiting for Silver when he got home.

His landlord watched impassionately from the doorway as Silver picked himself off the ground, one arm wrapped around his sure to be broken ribs. He tossed a bag with Silver’s belongings at his feet.

The next day when he showed up at the docks for work, the men who would previously greet him with a genial wave wouldn’t meet his eye. Some sneered, some ducked their head, but all made it clear as they refused him work that they had come to the same conclusion his landlord had come to.

Silver was _trouble_ , and he was unwelcome.

John the Giant. _Long John Silver._

King.

The names passed from mouth to mouth, falling from trembling lips with a whisper, lingering in the ears of sailors and merchants alike. The words straightened his shoulders, lifted his chin. He caught his men’s gaze with a direct eye and they did what he wanted them to without asking. He lowered his voice to menacing timber and men trembled.

He became what they wanted him to be.

 _Partner_ , Flint had said, accepting Silver’s word for it, and Silver became that too.

But their shoulders would brush as they stood side by side and addressed the men and Silver would think about it hours later. His stomach would twist and flip as he remembered the elated look Flint threw at him over the carcass of the shark in the launch, the way he stood close and thanked Silver the morning they were released from the queen’s cages. He lay in the small hut the maroon queen had given him and whispered Thomas’s name to himself, recalling the way Flint’s voice had softened as he said it. He would think about the way Flint’s eyes seemed to linger on him sometimes and wonder if _partner_ was the only term for it.

The British Navy didn’t care what you signed your name as, as long as they had a willing body to use in their war against Spain. Simon did well as a deckhand on the ship until the first battle, when the man standing beside him took a cannonball to the face. The man’s body went flying back, arms and legs flailing like a marionette cut from it’s strings. He looked down at the mass of blood and flesh and bones that used to be a person--one he had just been trading laconic comments with just a few minutes ago--and resolved to get off this ship and as far away from the war as he could as soon as humanly possible.

 _Coward_ he was sure they called him when they found him gone, but it didn’t matter. He shed Simon as easily as he had any name, and the word with it.

_John_ Madi whispered into his mouth. Her soft palms were bracketing his face, and inside that simple syllable Silver could hear a wealth of emotion. No one said the name like she did, and Silver chased the word with his lips, pressing harder against hers, slipping them open with his tongue so he could taste it.

 _Silver_ Flint called him as they sparred on the cliffs by the sea. Everyone on the ship called him this, but when Flint said it the word sounded like something of value, like the metal it described. They moved together with ease now that Silver had found his footing in the sand and Silver no longer ended each session with a dozen new bruises on his arms and legs, and even managed to give Flint a few of his own, every now and then.

“You shit,” he said again after Silver had performed a particularly dirty trick he’d knew in order to get the upper hand, but his tone was fond even as he rubbed at the forming bruise on his biceps and he was smiling as his mouth formed the words and it was the closest thing to an endearment anyone had ever given Silver.

The heat Silver felt building under his skin had nothing to do with the sun beating down on them and he wanted this. He wanted to be the things he heard in their voice when they said his name, wanted to be John Silver, could almost convince himself that it really was his name. After all, he had no way of knowing that his mother hadn’t held him in his arms after he was born and called him John.

But Flint disbelieved in an unremarkable life, and he wouldn’t be enough for Madi and even though he had been many things to many people, Silver knew himself best of all and he was no general. He was no king.

He aimed the pistol at Flint’s chest, watched his men lead him off the ship in chains and even though Flint never spoke the words that had been in his eyes as the day they stood across each other on that island, unable to meet in the middle, Silver said them all to himself.

_Traitor. Betrayer._

_Coward._

“Darling,” the man called over his shoulder after taking in Silver’s appearance with wide eyes. “There appears to be a rather bedraggled pirate standing on our stoop.”

For a minute Silver thought he must have knocked on the door of the wrong house. He couldn’t imagine the Flint he knew to ever allow someone to call him _darling_ , so he must have gotten it wrong, and now the man’s wife—who had probably read all the pamphlets about pirates in the Caribbean—would come around the corner and hysterically believe they were about to be murdered and their house plundered.

Then a sharp voice called out a _“What?”_ from inside the house and Silver knew that voice, knew that anger. He even knew the dangerous expression that darkened his features as Flint came into view.

An expression that immediately changed into one of surprise when he caught sight of Silver in the doorway.

“Hello,” Silver raised his hand in a small wave, unable to stop his lips from lifting in a wide, closed-mouth smile.

Unsurprisingly, Flint’s expression darkened again.

 _“Get out,”_ he snarled.

When Thomas finally managed to talk Flint into letting him into the house (“Be reasonable. We can’t exactly leave the most feared pirate in recent memory outside of our house for the neighbors to see.” Flint had snorted. “Second most feared pirate,” he’d growled, but relented.) Flint managed to fling at Silver all the words he had been unable to say that day on Skeleton Island.

Words like _ingrate_ and _coward_ and _stupid_ , _selfish_ and _traitorous_ and _worthless_.

Silver let him, absorbing them all. They were nothing worse than what he had said to himself over and over again since that wretched island. He let Flint unleash his anger and watched the play of emotions over his face, took in the way his hair—longer now—slipped from the loose tie in the back and fell into his face. He took note on how his face had filled out, and the missing earring, the plain, but clean clothes. Thomas had left them alone as soon as Silver stepped inside, and Silver drank his fill of his former captain—former _partner_ —until it became apparent that he had lost track of the conversation some time ago and Flint was just standing there, watching Silver watch him, an unreadable expression on his face.

Panic began to twist nastily in his stomach. He didn’t know what he was thinking, coming here. He wasn’t _John SIlver_ anymore, hadn’t been for years. He’d given up that name when he lost everyone who knew him by it.

“I should go,” he muttered, and turned away, his crutch clattering against the wall in his eagerness to get down the hall and through the door of Flint’s neat little house and out of his neat little life for good.

A hand caught his wrist, circled it tight, and Silver looked up in surprise.

Flint’s brows were furrowed over his eyes and a muscle ticked in jaw as he stared down at Silver, his whole expression tight with emotion as he visibly tried to find the words he wanted to say. _“Don’t,”_ was what he finally rasped out and it made Silver turn back around. Flint shifted with him until they were facing each other, standing only inches apart, Silver’s wrist still clasped in Flint’s hand.

Silver studied his expression. The anger was still there, yes, but there was something else too. Something vulnerable and desperate as Flint’s eyes mapped out the shape of his face much like Silver had done his a moment ago. They were so close that he could feel Flint’s breath on his face—hot, harsh gasps against his skin. His thumb was circling Silver’s pulse point on his wrist.

Silver kissed him.

Flint gasped in surprise and Silver, never one who failed to press the advantage, used his shock to step closer, to wrap one hand against the back of his neck and tangle his finger in his hair. He waited for the rejection—for Flint’s hand to let go of his wrist and instead push against his chest, for the snarl and the contempt that would twist Flint’s features.

It never came. Instead Flint stepped even closer, his free hand wrapping around his biceps and jerking him further into his body. The one holding his wrist shifted until it wasn’t clasping so much as cradling, pressing Silver’s hand against his chest as they breathed together.

Flint matched Silver in his fervor, deepening the kiss until breaths became gasps and they had to pull apart.

Flint tipped his forehead against Silver’s. “Stay.” His firm tone made the word a command, but his eyes were closed as if he was afraid Silver would deny him.

“Alright,” Silver closed his own eyes, swaying forward into Flint’s warmth. “I’ll stay.”

It turned out Flint had no problem whatsoever with being called “darling.” Or any other kind of endearment for that matter. The daily conversations between Flint and Thomas were peppered with them. They were casual and absent minded, like when one of them requested a favor while absorbed in another task, or said with a sardonic tone in order to make a point. They were warm with gratitude and affection, muttered petulantly under their breath, laced with amusement and patience as they were sighed out with a shake of the head.

Some nights Silver could hear them through the thin walls of the small house they lived in. The low moans and soft gasps broken up by _yes_ and _there_ and _love_. A rumbling laugh followed by an amused _yes dear_ followed by a short thump and more laughter that soon melted back into moans.

Some nights Silver wondered if Thomas could hear _them_. If he was also awake, listening to the drawn out _god_ that was pulled from Flint’s throat as Silver dragged his lips down the underside of his cock, or the way his voice broke on the word _fuck_ when Silver finally slipped his mouth over the head and sank down, hands reaching to cup Flint’s ass and pull him forward, encouraging him to move. Swears would fall from Flint’s mouth like love confessions as he wrapped Silver’s hair around his fists and began to rock, and Silver savored every one, moaning around Flint and fisting his own cock until Flint would finally rip away with a groan. He’d pull Silver up to cover his own body, or shove him to the bed in order to blanket him with his and he would kiss him, deep and slick, hips rocking against Silver’s in a frenzy of _John John John…_

The first time Flint called him by an endearment Silver froze.

It was early morning—which wasn’t Silver’s best time of the day—and he was sitting at their rough kitchen table, staring blearily at a growing stain on the wall when Flint murmured “Here, love,” and pressed a warm cup of tea into his hand.

Silver’s hands automatically curled around the cup even as his breath caught in his chest. Flint turned away and walked across the kitchen to fetch his own tea, completely oblivious to the heat Silver could feel raging beneath his skin. He stared, wide eyed, at the profile of Flint’s shoulders as he moved easily in the kitchen preparing his breakfast and didn’t move, didn’t drink.

To his right, Thomas suddenly chuckled, and it tore Silver from his stupor. He whipped his head around to see Thomas smiling at him, his own tea raised halfway to his lips. “I remember that feeling,” he told Silver, expression turning wistful as he turned his gaze to Flint. He gave Silver another smile and stood up, one hand landing on Silver’s shoulder in a companionable clasp as he made his way over to help Flint with the food.

Silver stayed where he was, long forbidden from doing any of the cooking, and watched the two of them as they worked together, bickering lightly as they cooked, each at one point looking back to Silver to catch his eye and attempt to bring him to their side of the argument.

Later that day Flint caught Silver’s wrist as he passed him on his way to the larder and swung him around, pressing him up against the wall. He placed open mouth kisses against the base of Silver’s throat and pulled his shirt out of his trousers, hands still cold from when he was outside chopping wood as they dragged up Silver’s ribs. _Love_ Flint pressed against his skin, and _mine_ and _Silver_ , and he had been John Silver to many, many people over the years, but Flint murmured his name like the word meant something of value, more precious than the metal it described.

**Author's Note:**

> [Come say hi on my tumblr!](https://aisalynn.tumblr.com/)


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